The ability of educators, including educational institutions, private corporations, and institutions of higher learning, to reach potential students has generally been limited by geography. In most instances, a potential student must physically move to within commuting distance or onto a campus in order to have access to course instructors, classes, and materials. Furthermore, potential students and persons seeking knowledge of all sorts are generally limited to proximate sources of courses of instruction, tutoring, or training. Due to these limitations, a prospective student must either seek to learn a given subject from whatever local means of instruction is available to her or move her household in order to be able to access her preferred sources of instruction. Many prospective students are deprived of receiving instruction from other, possibly better-qualified instructors or institutions located outside of their immediate locale. Similarly, educational institutions have been limited to serving only those students located within commutable distance of their campuses. This applies whether the student(s) and/or instructors(s) are in the United States, Japan, Kenya, Germany, or India.
The advent of networked computers and communications has afforded a partial solution to these limitations. In particular, the widespread use and availability of electronic networks such as the Internet and the WWW have made it possible for students and educators to overcome geographic dispersion and physical location as a barrier to education or training. Using this electronic medium, students and instructors are able to exchange information including live or transcribed classroom lectures, homework assignments, texts and materials, grading, live or transcribed question and answer interaction sessions, and other related information to effect a traditional learning or educational experience regardless of physical location.
However, electronic networks, including the Internet, are complex technological systems requiring the user to have or acquire specialized knowledge in order to use them effectively. Even graphical user interfaces (GUIs) designed to enhance simplicity of use, such as that provided by the WWW, may require specialized knowledge of network terminology and technical aspects. For example, an Internet user's ability to access information using that medium is significantly reduced if the user lacks understanding of how to use Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) to navigate web pages. Slow adoption of new technology and lack of technological sophistication have a chilling effect on the widespread use of the medium in general. Applied specifically in an educational context, these chilling factors apply to instructors who, while possessing high expertise in their respective intellectual or educational fields, would be required to further attain technological knowledge necessary to effectively use the Internet to educate non-collocated students.
Furthermore, the complexity of using the Internet for educational purposes is compounded as the number of user choices required at the user interface increases because not only must the instructor and students acquire technological competency in the use of the medium, but they must in addition understand the presentation and consequences of large number of choices required by a particular user interface such as a web page. The design of the user interface, therefore, can be critical in enabling widespread use of the medium in an educational context. Solutions other than the present invention may be characterized as having relatively complicated and confusing user interfaces. Users, including students and instructors, of these other solutions are confronted with one or more web pages that typically require the user to review and select a subsequent web page or function from among a large array of potential user choices, thereby complicating the user's task of interacting with the system.
Further, many educational institutions have existing or legacy network-based systems that students access to obtain various types of information (e.g., class schedules). The addition of yet another network-based system requires the host or sponsoring institution to incur implementation and maintenance costs associated with the installation, integration, administration, and maintenance of a new network-based system. These costs place limits on the achieving the widespread use of the medium for educational purposes.
The exception has been so-called virtual schools. Virtual schools traditionally charge an enrollment fee, and then offer free courses. In lieu of paying for each course taken, a student is subjected to advertising while viewing on-line course material. While such billing and income generation methods may be acceptable for companies providing on-line training, such methods are inconsistent with traditional college and university billing practices. Colleges and universities typically charge a low enrollment fee and bill students on a per-credit or per course basis.
There are interactive systems currently being marketed for distributing and using information over a network that permit activities by system users according to the level of the user. A network in this context may be a LAN, MAN, WAN, intranet, the Internet and/or the WWW. Applications of such technology may be in the area of educational or corporate training systems. In such systems, system users, entities providing instruction, and system providers will interact with the system so that content may be provided to the student or person receiving training over the network. As stated, the student or person receiving training may be located at different locations than the instructor, yet be interactive with the instructor via a network system. Accordingly, these systems remove the geographic limitations that typically attach to typical teaching systems.
The removal of the geographic limitations was conducive to LAN, MAN, WAN, intranet, the Internet, or WWW-based system being used as the networking medium for providers, instructors, and entities receiving instruction. This also permitted the course of instruction to accommodate disparate sources of information that in the past could not be included in the course of instruction. Moreover, this model permitted classes of instruction to vary widely in make up. For example, a class may include a number of individuals and instructors connected only through the network system. However, it may also be configured to be groups of individuals at various locations connected through the network system and the instructor may be located with one of the groups of students. It may further include the instructor and students located in one location and the materials being used for instruction being provided only over the network system because of the rarity of the source material.
The networked systems that have just been described from a conceptual view are very attractive. However, once they are viewed from the practical, user-based level, there are considerable challenges to the implementation and use of these systems. Existing systems have not reached a level where standards have evolved so that there is some consistency in nomenclature, structure, or interfacing to such systems. Each system is technologically complex and specialized to what system developers believe are important. Therefore, the system users, regardless of level, may find it difficult to use without, in many cases, very specialized training as to the particularized interworkings of that specific system. Most of these systems do not lend themselves to rapid use after a brief introduction. Although the general populus in the Westernized countries are becoming more “computer savvy” with each passing year, this does not mean that the worldwide society that could make use of these non-geographically limited educational or training systems would not have difficulty using them because of their nonuser-friendly nature. This is magnified given the number of users types that will access and use the system, e.g., instructors, students, and individuals receiving instruction, system providers and everything or everyone that may be a hybrid of each of these groups, and potential language barriers without very specialized conversion of the systems.
To the extent that current networked educational or training systems exist, they are configured from the institution or company perspective and not to that of the user. Further, these systems are not readily adaptable to be converted to favor the individual user's perspectives. The student or individual receiving instruction is inextricably tied to the institution's configuration without the ability to tailor his/her experience that would better fit his/her individual style in obtaining, using, and processing information contributing information.
In a typical conventional system, the student or individual receiving instruction will access different locations or web pages of the institution's or company's network system to obtain the information that he/she desires or post with the institution or company. In order to gain such access, the student or individual may be required to logon a number of networks to obtain the desired information or upload it. This can be frustrating to students or individuals because small errors in the process can greatly increase the time to perform activities on the system. At some point, the frustrated student or individual may give up or be required to seek help. The alternative of consolidating all the activities at one web-site may itself cause problems given the institution's or company's purposeful segregation of the activities at the various network system sites since the main idea is to make the system more institutional or company-centric rather than student- or individual-centric.
Current networked systems that are used for education or training will require the instructor to make lecture and textual information available to the students or individuals. As can be imagined, various instructors, whether the educational or company setting, will have very different teaching styles. Present-day systems that typically are institution- or company-centric are not readily adaptable to accommodate these differences in teaching styles. The best description of these systems would be to refer to them as “one size fits all” types of systems. Therefore, there will exist a constant struggle between the instructors, and institutions or companies to derive system refinements and customizations to meet the instructors' needs. This creates nightmares for institutions and companies from the maintenance and management standpoint.
With regard to maintenance, the institution or company must continue to provide support for the ever changing nature of the system, which is very expensive and time consuming. And, with regard to management, the institution or company must create customizations on demand and attend to the development and testing processes associated with these new and varied customizations. This again is expensive and time consuming.
Current LAN, MAN, WAN, intranet, Internet or WWW-based systems that may accommodate the educational or corporate systems that have been discussed, slow significantly as the large numbers of students or trainees stress the network to obtain information or use the system for its intended purposes. This adds to user frustration and system dissatisfaction. If this is one of the major initiatives of the educational or company training system, it will reflect badly on the institution or company.
Current educational and company-based training systems have difficulty presenting multiple functions on-line activities because of the complexity. For example, there are problems in providing on-line registration for educational courses along with providing tuition payments. This is due in part to the incompatibility of billing practices and the continual customization of the integration of the registration for courses and payment techniques.
Current educational and company-based systems have difficulty being provided in various languages. Typically, in order to obtain a system that will be presented in a different language, it is necessary to take the system as created in a native language and translate it in its entirety to be presented in the second language. Current-day systems are not particularly adaptable to be rapidly changed from one language to another with little effort without the need to separately translate the system.
The present invention overcomes the problems of conventional system to provide a system that is user friendly and easy to use through a user interface.
Therefore, it is a general object of the present invention to provide a system and methods that allow users to interact with a computer network-based education support system through means of a simplified, easy-to-use user interface.
A further general object of the present invention is to provide a system that can be easily integrated with existing computer network and backend systems with minimal disruption to existing operations and systems.
A still further general object of the present invention is to provide a system that is scalable in order to accommodate increasing numbers of users, such that system responsiveness is not materially degraded as the number of users of the system grows to an increasingly large number.
A still further general object of the present invention is to provide a system and methods that can accommodate a variety of diverse teaching modes without requiring substantial modifications to the system.
A further object of the invention is to provide a system that allows multiple types of users to access the features of the system as a function of their predefined role within the framework of the system, such as, a student, a teacher, or an administrator.
It is a further object of the invention to provide such a system that integrates with the education platform so that there will be provided therein value added services and control such as calendar, task, contact and communication functions.
It is another object of the invention to support multiple locales, and have multiple locales display in a user's browser based on an administrative configuration.
An even still further object of the present invention is to provide a system and method that is accessible according to the access level of the system user.
It is still a further object of the present invention to provide a network-based interactive system that is readily adaptable to accommodate multiple languages.
These as well as other objects of the present invention are apparent upon inspection of the specification and drawings.